Her hair hung heavy with sweat down over her face. Her chubby legs trembled, exhausted but still holding her up. Dry-humping the lump in his pants.
Peter's fingers clutched her breasts tighter. His hips pushed up, and his face, his orbicularis oculi, squeezed his eyes shut. His triangularis pulled the corners of his mouth down so his bottom teeth showed. His coffee-yellowed teeth bit at the air.
A hot wetness pulsed out of Misty, and Peter's erection was pulsing inside his pants, and everything else stopped. They both stopped breathing for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven long moments.
Then they both wilted. Withering. Peter's body relaxed onto the wet floor. Misty's flattened onto him. Both of them, their clothes were pasted together with sweat.
The painting of the tall church looked down from the wall.
And right then, a museum guard walked up.
August 20—
The Third-Quarter Moon
GRACE'S VOICE, in the dark, it tells Misty, “The work you're doing will buy your family freedom.” It says, “No summer people will come back here for decades.”
Unless Peter wakes up someday, Grace and Misty are the only Wilmots left.
Unless you wake up, there won't be any more Wilmots.
You can hear the slow, measured sound of Grace cutting something with scissors.
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. There's no point rebuilding the family fortune. Let the house go to the Catholics. Let the summer people swarm over the island. With Tabbi dead, the Wilmots have no stake in the future. No investment.
Grace says, “Your work is a gift to the future, and anyone who tries to stop you will be cursed by history.”
While Misty paints, Grace's hands circle her waist with something, then her arms, her neck. It's something that rubs her skin, light and soft.
“Misty dear, you have a seventeen-inch waist,” Grace says.
It's a tape measure.
Something smooth slips between her lips, and Grace's voice says, “It's time you took another pill.” A drinking straw pokes into her mouth, and Misty sips enough water to swallow the capsule.
In 1819, Théodore Géricault painted his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa. It showed the ten castaways that survived out of one hundred and forty-seven people left adrift on a raft for two weeks after their ship sank. At the time, Géricault had just abandoned his pregnant mistress. To punish himself, he shaved his head. He saw no friends for almost two years, never going out in public. He was twenty-seven and lived in isolation, painting. Surrounded by the dying people and cadavers he studied for his masterpiece. After several suicide attempts, he died at thirty-two.
Grace says, “We all die.” She says, “The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
She runs the tape measure down the length of Misty's legs.
Something cold and smooth slides against Misty's cheek, and Grace's voice tells her, “Feel.” Grace says, “It's satin. I'm sewing your gown for the opening.”
Instead of “gown,” Misty hears shroud.
Just from the feel, Misty knows it's white satin. Grace is cutting down Misty's wedding dress. Remaking it. Making it last forever. Born again. Reborn. Misty's Wind Song perfume still on it, Misty recognizes herself.
Grace says, “We've invited everyone. All the summer people. Your opening will be the biggest social event in a hundred years.”
The same as her wedding. Our wedding.
Instead of “opening,” Misty hears offering.
Grace says, “You're almost done. Only eighteen more paintings to complete.”
To make an even one hundred.
Instead of “done,” Misty hears dead.
August 21
TODAY IN THE DARKNESS behind Misty's eyelids, the hotel's fire alarm goes off. One long ringing bell in the hallway, it comes through the door so loud Grace has to shout, “Oh, what is it now?” She puts a hand on Misty's shoulder and says, “Keep working.”
The hand squeezes, and Grace says, “Just finish this last picture. That's all we need.”
Her footsteps go away, and the door to the hall opens. The alarm is louder for a moment, ringing, shrill as the recess bell at Tabbi's school. At her own grade school, growing up. The ringing is soft, again, as Grace shuts the door behind her. She doesn't lock it.
But Misty keeps painting.
Her mom in Tecumseh Lake, when Misty told her about maybe marrying Peter Wilmot and moving to Waytansea Island, her mom told Misty that all big-money fortunes are based on fooling people and pain. The bigger the fortune, she said, the more people got hurt. For rich people, she said, the first marriage was just about reproduction. She asked, did Misty really want to spent the rest of her life surrounded by that kind of person?
Her mom asked, “Don't you want to be an artist anymore?”
Just for the record, Misty told her, Yeah, sure.
It wasn't even that Misty was so in love with Peter. Misty didn't know what it was. She just couldn't go home to that trailer park, not anymore.
Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.
They don't teach you that in art school.
The fire alarm keeps ringing.
The week Peter and Misty eloped, it was over Christmas break. That whole week, Misty let her mom worry. The minister looked at Peter and said, “Smile, son. You look as though you're facing a firing squad.”
Her mom, she called the college. She called the hospitals. One emergency room had the body of a dead woman, a young woman found naked in a ditch and stabbed a hundred times in the stomach. Misty's mom, she spent Christmas Day driving across three counties to look at the mutilated dead body of this Jane Doe. While Peter and Misty marched down the main aisle of the Waytansea church, her mom held her breath and watched a police detective pull down the zipper on a body bag.
Back in that previous life, Misty called her mom a couple days after Christmas. Sitting in the Wilmot house behind a locked door, Misty fingered the junk
